David Lang’s true pearl: an opera in five tapestries (with libretto by Sybil Kempson), is inspired by Isabella Stewart Gardner’s sixteenth-century tapestries that tell the story of the first king of Persia, Cyrus the Great. The five-part “in-ear opera” is a private experience, available only through headphones in the Museum’s Tapestry Room. The “stage set” for each scene is an individual tapestry from the Cyrus series, and listeners are immediately immersed into tales of empire building and passion.

true pearl is premiered on October 4 by vocal project Roomful of Teeth and the Callithumpian Consort ensemble, conducted by Stephen Drury.

Please go here for more information on this one and only live performance of the work.

For five consecutive nights this fall — October 3-7, 2018 — 1,000 singers from across New York City will come together on the High Line for the world premiere of the mile-long opera — conceived by architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro and David Lang, with music by Lang, text by Anne Carson and Claudia Rankine and staging by directors Elizabeth Diller and Lynsey Peisinger. Audience members will be active participants in this ambitious work as they walk along the park: moving in and out of groups of singers, the audience will be immersed in hundreds of stories inspired by the accounts of a wide range of New Yorkers, about life in our rapidly changing city.

A team of artists, professional and recreational singers, public space advocates, and community and business leaders have come together to create the event. At the heart of the opera is an extensive community engagement initiative, organized by Peoplmovr, along with the High Line, in collaboration with non-profit cultural organizations across all five boroughs: Abrons Arts Center and the Greater Harlem Chamber of Commerce in Manhattan, ARTs East NY in Brooklyn, Jacob A. Riis Neighborhood Settlement in Queens, The POINT CDC in the Bronx, and Snug Harbor in Staten Island. Each of these partners serves as a hub for engaging local audiences by recruiting singers, holding and welcoming the public for open rehearsals and workshops, and hosting social and cultural events in the lead-up to the October performances.

The event, called "The Mile-Long Opera: a biography of 7 o'clock", was conceived by architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro and David Lang. Acclaimed poets Anne Carson and Claudia Rankine are writing the text, inspired by real-life stories, many of them gathered through first-hand interviews with residents throughout the city, asking what 7:00 pm means to them. While 7:00 pm almost universally represents a time of transition from day to night, when people shift from one activity to the next, these conversations reveal a vast spectrum of feelings and perspectives—and, by extension, represent the diverse character of the city’s inhabitants and their individual experiences.

Lang is setting Carson and Rankine’s text to original music to be sung by the immense chorus, led by conductor Donald Nally. Elizabeth Diller and co-director Lynsey Peisinger will stage the performance along the entire length of the elevated park.

The event challenges conventions of what opera is and whom it is for. Set in a public space, the opera invites all New Yorkers to join in and experience the performances at close range. All performances are free, but require advance tickets, which will be available online at a date to be announced. On the day of each performance, the High Line will close early for general audiences, and only registered ticket holders will have access that evening.

"The Mile-Long Opera: a biography of 7 o'clock" is produced by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the High Line, and The OFFICE performing arts + film. This project would not be possible without the generous support of Target, which is the presenting sponsor, or the partnership of the NYC Department of Parks & Recreation.

This season, the New York Philharmonic concludes their three-week-long Music of Conscience initiative, as well as their subscription season, with the world premiere of David Lang’s opera prisoner of the state on June 6–8, 2019, conducted by their new Music Director Jaap van Zweden. Co-commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, Rotterdam's de Doelen Concert Hall, London’s Barbican Centre, Barcelona’s l’Auditori, Bochum Symphony Orchestra, and Bruges’s Concertgebouw, prisoner of the state is the story of a woman who disguises herself as a prison guard to rescue her husband from unjust political imprisonment.

With a libretto by the composer that refers self-consciously to Fidelio, Beethoven’s only opera, prisoner of the state features the Philharmonic debuts of soprano Julie Mathevet as The Assistant, tenor Alan Oke as The Leader, and baritone Jarrett Ott as The Prisoner, as well as bass-baritone Eric Owens as The Jailor. It will be directed by Elkhanah Pulitzer — who has directed works for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco Opera, Los Angeles Opera, and Boston Lyric Opera, among others — in her Philharmonic debut.

Along with many accolades, Lang is recognized for his vocal music, including his Pulitzer Prize-winning the little match girl passion, and for writing narrative music for dance, films, and theatrical productions, as well as his operas. He earned Golden Globe, Critics' Choice, and Academy Award nominations for his music in Paolo Sorrentino's film Youth; he has recently scored Paul Dano's directorial debut, Wildlife, which is released in theaters later this year.

Lang's operas include the loser, which features a failed piano student on a platform-stage, seemingling floating in mid-air as he recounts a life lived in the shadows of his famous friend Glenn Gould; the whisper opera, during which the musicians never perform above a hush; anatomy theater, which follows the astonishing progression of an English murderess: from confession to execution and, ultimately, public dissection before a paying audience of fascinated onlookers; the difficulty of crossing a field, a fully-staged production based on Ambrose Bierce's short story about a plantation owner who goes missing while crossing his own farm, and modern painters for Santa Fe Opera, directed by Francesca Zambello.

The Seattle Symphony and the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra both premiere new orchestral works by Lang in this current season. symphony without a hero premiered at the Seattle Symphony on February 8, inspired by Anna Akhmatova and her "Poem without a Hero," which Lang came to through a childhood obsession with Shostakovich and Russian music. On March 14-15, the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra presents the premiere of harmony and understanding for orchestra and audience (co-commissioned by the New World Symphony), in which the conductor teaches the audience its role at the beginning, before the orchestra comes out, and they perform the rest of the piece together. No one is a spectator; the audience is not the audience, rather a chorus of community members contributing to making something beautiful. Lang is continually experimenting with turning audiences into performers. This fall as part of a project to raise funds to repair the broken instruments owned by The School District of Philadelphia, he wrote symphony for broken instruments, specifically for the sounds that the instruments make in their broken state, performed by a host of professional and amateur musicians around the Philadelphia-area.

This season, the New York Philharmonic, led by their new Music Director Jaap van Zweden, examines New York City's roots as a destination of immigrants during New York Stories: Threads of Our City. The centerpiece for the season is the world premiere, January 24–26, of Julia Wolfe’s Fire in my mouth, commissioned by the orchestra, Cal Performances at the University of California, Berkeley; the Krannert Center at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the University Musical Society at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Wolfe's music focuses on the garment industry in New York City at the turn of the century — specifically the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which killed 146 garment workers, most of them young, female immigrants. The immersive, multimedia performance features the Philharmonic debut of the 36 women of the chamber choir The Crossing, directed by Donald Nally, as well as the Philharmonic debut of Jeff Sugg as scenic, lighting, video, and projection designer.

The title of Wolfe's new work comes from labor activist Clara Lemlich Shavelson, who, when looking back on her radical youth said, “Ah, then I had fire in my mouth,” though the titular fire also refers to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Wolfe is using her signature intensive research methods, drawing on oral histories, speeches, interviews, and historical writings. The music will capture the roar of hundreds of sewing machines and the language of protest to recreate the world of women working in New York garment factories in the early 20th century. Throughout the current season, Wolfe has workshopped Fire in my mouth with the Philharmonic's three commissioning partners. Campus-wide discussions about history, music, and creative writing have been an important part of Wolfe's writing process.

Wolfe's previous works on labor history have had extended lives beyond the premieres, with a Steel Hammer stage show and a performance of Anthracite Fields in coal country. The Steel Hammer stage show, which toured the country in the fall of 2015 before ending at BAM's Next Wave Festival, incorporated the work of four American playwrights into the original art ballad. At the same time, Wolfe took the Bang on a Can All-Stars and the Choir of Trinity Wall Street to Pennsylvania coal country to share Anthracite Fields with the community who inspired her, in a benefit concert for the Anthracite Heritage Museum in Scranton. To date Anthracite Fields has also been performed in Philadelphia, PA; New York, NY; Los Angeles, CA; Berkeley, CA; Champaign-Urbana, IL; Trenton, NJ; Copenhagen, Denmark; Athens, Greece; Amsterdam, the Netherlands; and Prague, the Czech Republic. It will be performed at The Kennedy Center on March 13, 2018, and at Carnegie Hall on December 1, 2018.

Gordon's work, inspired by Crater Lake National Park in Oregon and commissioned by the Britt Orchestra as part of the 100th anniversary of America’s National Park Service, premiered the morning of July 29, 2016, on the rim of the lake with musicians spatially situated around the site.

The documentary follows Gordon, musicians, conductor Teddy Abrams, members of the Klamath Tribe and park personnel as they prepare for the premiere and reflect on the importance, beauty and spiritual-qualities of Crater Lake and how the site-specific performance of Gordon's work combines with their experience of the natural wonder.

The work was performed by 40 members of the Britt Festival Orchestra (with conductor Teddy Abrams), plus a 70-voice choir, 30 brass and percussionists, and 15 members of the local Klamath Tribe who play and sing on the "Steiger Butte Drum", a third-generation Northern-style powwow drum. Giiwas (Crater Lake), which means "A Spiritual Place", is the ancestral homeland of the Klamath Tribal people.

Gordon visited the lake in the summer of 2015 and winter of 2016 and spent time with both Park Superintendent Craig Ackerman and Park Historian Stephen Mark. He also conversed with local writer Lee Juillerat who provided him with additional background on the history of the region and native lore and tradition. On his last trip to the park, Gordon spent a week in a ranger's house in the dead of winter. During that period, he worked with the Klameth tribal drummers, who are the soloists of the piece.

For Gordon, this work is “designed to be an experiential spectacle. The idea is to draw out the natural sounds in and around Crater Lake and connect the natural sonic environment to the orchestra.”

He continues:

In my time at Crater Lake last winter, the thing I was thinking about is the symphony that’s going on all year long: the sounds of the animals, the birds chirping, the wind blowing, even that sound of the expanse of the lake. I was imagining this chorus of the animals, the symphony that’s been going for centuries.

The circumstances of this piece are unique — to be able to write a piece of music that’s going to be played at Crater Lake and to work with such a variety of musical forces: Tribal musicians, a full symphony and chorus, brass orchestra and percussionists. It’s a pretty overwhelming feeling. It’s thrilling and humbling.

For more information about this work or anything from Michael Gordon's extensive catalogue, info [at] redpoppymusic [dot] com (please write us)!

This concert is part of a week-long residency by Ms. Wolfe (a U-M alum) to develop Fire in my Mouth, an evening-length orchestral work co-commissioned by UMS with the New York Philharmonic, Cal Performances and the Krannert Center.

I became a composer because, when I was nine years old, I saw a movie of Leonard Bernstein conducting Shostakovich’s First Symphony with the New York Philharmonic. I fell in love immediately with the music of Shostakovich, with the idea of being a composer, with the orchestra itself. I was so in love with Shostakovich, in fact, that I immersed myself in his music, and then all Russian music, then I studied the Russian language in school, I read all the Russian literature I could find, and I spent the summer of 1975 studying in the Soviet Union.

My pursuit of Shostakovich led me to the poetry of Anna Akhmatova, his great contemporary. There is a (possibly apocryphal) story that they were each aware of the other their entire lives but met only once – they spent twenty minutes together, staring at each other, in total silence.

One of Akhmatova’s greatest works is her introspective, memory-laden Soviet-era "Poem without a Hero." I have always loved this work — it is kaleidoscopic and strange, both fragile and powerful at the same time. And of course, who is the non-hero of the poem? The young poets she remembers and writes about, or herself? Is it her present or her past?

The poem can be hard going. My Russian was never good enough to read it in the original and there are things about it that make it inscrutable in any language — it is the distant memory of people and things so personal to her as to be almost unknowable to us. Reading the poem can feel like watching Akhmatova from afar, and through a gauzy veil. I started thinking that the idea of ‘distant memory’ was a musical idea. Memory is, after all, the basis of musical form — we hear something, we remember it when it returns, it is in our memory of it that we assemble the details of a piece into a particular structure. I started wondering if memory in music could work the same way that memory works in the Akhmatova — a wisp of something delicate and precious that might hover vaguely someplace beneath the surface of an overwhelming and oppressive present.

I began by writing a melody that went from the beginning of the piece to the very end - a 28 minute long tune. I superimposed many different versions of the melody onto each other, simultaneously, in layers of slower and faster speeds, in the foreground and in the background, with greater or lesser detail. I thought I could create the feeling of a distant, elusive memory by making a tune that was constantly in the process of revealing itself, without ever revealing itself completely.

Gradually, as the onscreen image pulls back, the audience can discern that the twitching eyeball isn’t recorded, but is rather a very much live, high-definition stare at Mikaela Bennett, the soprano at the center of “Acquanetta.” The composer Michael Gordon and librettist Deborah Artman’s old-school-suspenseful “filmic opera” had its chamber version premiere at the Prototype festival of new opera-theater on Tuesday at the Gelsey Kirkland Arts Center in Dumbo, Brooklyn.

The production’s camera eye — and the audience’s gaze — rarely move away from Ms. Bennett over the next 70 minutes in an opera that feels like a major addition to this composer’s canon. A founder of the influential Bang on a Can collective, Mr. Gordon has a history of creating scores that can work alongside moving images. But “Acquanetta” is something different — and grander.

The plot has a true-story undercurrent. The actress Mildred Davenport, known as Acquanetta, had a celebrated (if necessarily minor) career in 1940s B movies, including the horror film “Captive Wild Woman” — elements of which are repurposed in this opera. Its creators describe her career as brief, saying in a program note that she “inexplicably walked away from the Hollywood studio system.” Rather than telling the actress’s biography straight, “Acquanetta” bills itself as a “one-act deconstruction” of the horror genre. But that makes the piece sound more academic than it is. Though experimental in design, it doesn’t stint on narrative; it hurls the audience into the maelstrom of the making of “Captive Wild Woman” — starring her and, yes, an ape — heightening the wary, intoxicating experience of being a young woman in Hollywood. The director, Daniel Fish, delights in parceling out important information, just like a horror film should. (Some of the ways his staging builds and releases tension are too good to spoil.)

“Acquanetta,” which debuted in an arrangement for more instruments in 2006, also mulls questions of gender, identity, media representation and spectatorship. Its wittiest section comes when a stereotypical blonde bombshell from the film-within-the-opera sings what sounds like an appeal to a zombie, with the refrain “Please don’t take my brain.” (The chorus eventually takes up the feminist chant of “I want to play a real woman.”) Amelia Watkins brings usefully campy acting to the role of this “Brainy Woman.” But she also excels in bringing across the character’s underlying existential dread.

Ms. Bennett works the same magic with the title role. Her opening aria is a list poem of desires, presumably addressed to Hollywood. (“Bury me, transform me, convince me, remake me.”) But as soon as the song ends — as the whirl of the studio system starts to drown her in makeup and director’s commentary — her face communicates real-life horror.

Her adroit performance is as well suited to the libretto’s subtleties as her voice is to the music’s thrashing intensity. Mr. Gordon’s writing, for a small yet loudly amplified rock-meets-classical ensemble, is similarly alert. Long stretches of his score channel a doomy, goth-rock energy. But he also sprinkles in unexpected accents — including swooning touches of folk-like string harmonies — that keep the soundscape as nimble as Ms. Artman’s text. The conductor Daniela Candillari guides a uniformly powerful cast, as well as a tight ensemble of the Bang on a Can Opera musicians and the members of the Choir of Trinity Wall Street.

If only there were a new-opera studio, akin to the vintage B-picture system, that could churn out works of this energy and originality. But, alas, contemporary music is rarely produced at the pace of a Universal or an RKO, so audiences should catch Prototype’s brief run of “Acquanetta” while they can.

• 11/9: Sounds of Music Festival — Impatience, Lick, and Girlfriend performed by Ensemble Klang and the Prins Claus Conservatorium; Earring performed by Saskia Lankhoorn; Lick and Girlfriend performed by Ensemble Klang; Reeling performed by the Bang on a Can All-Stars• 11/10: Sounds of Music Festival — Anthracite Fields performed by the Bang on a Can All-Stars with Cappella Amsterdam• 11/11: Sounds of Music Festival — Impatience, On Seven-Star-Shoes and Believing performed by the Prins Claus Conservatorium

On October 27, 2007 Paul Hillier and Theatre of Voices premiered David Lang's the little match girl passion in Carnegie Hall. The composition won Lang a Pulitzer Prize, the recording won a Grammy Award, and the score has since become one of the most performed new works in the world.

Staged by Glimmerglass Opera and Portland Opera, choreographed by the Paris Opera Ballet and the Royal Swedish Ballet, with theatrical productions in Moscow, London, Edinburgh, and Sydney, it has been performed over 400 times across 35 countries.

“

I don’t think I’ve ever been so moved by a new composition... which is unlike any music I know.

— Tim Page, Pulitzer juror

This season alone there are more than 40 global performances — concerts in Australia, Switzerland, Slovenia, Italy, Holland, France, Lithuania, Germany, China, Canada, the UK and across the United States.

Over the past 10 years, it has joined the repertoire as a chamber work, a staged production, a work for full chorus, and a featured event on Christmas and Easter concerts around the world. Indeed, it has become a contemporary choral classic.

On December 22, the little match girl passion has its annual performance at the MET Museum. This year, the concert returns to the Medieval Sculpture Hall, and the emphasis is on the Passion aspect of the work: the audience is the congregation and is invited to participate in the performance, contributing interstitial hymns and songs that are familiar to all, and that bind us as a community.

After the Museum's 2012 concert, Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times hoped that having the little match girl passion would "become a Met Museum holiday tradition" — and it has. This is the sixth annual holiday performance: “I cannot imagine a more appropriate occasion and setting to hear this poignant and, by the end, consoling piece,” Tommasini added.

With a text that Lang himself wrote — based on Hans Christian Andersen's tale, the Gospel According to St. Matthew, and passages from Bach's St. Matthew Passion — the little match girl passion tells the story of a young girl who is forced to sell matches on the street and freezes to death. The recording of the little match girl passion by Paul Hillier's group Theatre of Voices on Harmonium Mundi received the 2010 Grammy Award for Best Small Ensemble Performance.

Lang describes the work:

I wanted to tell a story. A particular story — in fact, the story of The Little Match Girl by the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen. The original is ostensibly for children, and it has that shocking combination of danger and morality that many famous children's stories do. A poor young girl, whose father beats her, tries unsuccessfully to sell matches on the street, is ignored, and freezes to death. Through it all she somehow retains her Christian purity of spirit, but it is not a pretty story.

What drew me to The Little Match Girl is that the strength of the story lies not in its plot but in the fact that all its parts—the horror and the beauty—are constantly suffused with their opposites. The girl's bitter present is locked together with the sweetness of her past memories; her poverty is always suffused with her hopefulness. There is a kind of naive equilibrium between suffering and hope.

There are many ways to tell this story. One could convincingly tell it as a story about faith or as an allegory about poverty. What has always interested me, however, is that Andersen tells this story as a kind of parable, drawing a religious and moral equivalency between the suffering of the poor girl and the suffering of Jesus. The girl suffers, is scorned by the crowd, dies, and is transfigured. I started wondering what secrets could be unlocked from this story if one took its Christian nature to its conclusion and unfolded it, as Christian composers have traditionally done in musical settings of the Passion of Jesus.

The most interesting thing about how the Passion story is told is that it can include texts other than the story itself. These texts are the reactions of the crowd, penitential thoughts, statements of general sorrow, shock, or remorse. These are devotional guideposts, the markers for our own responses to the story, and they have the effect of making the audience more than spectators to the sorrowful events onstage. These responses can have a huge range—in Bach's "Saint Matthew Passion," these extra texts range from famous chorales that his congregation was expected to sing along with to completely invented characters, such as the "Daughter of Zion" and the "Chorus of Believers." The Passion format—the telling of a story while simultaneously commenting upon it—has the effect of placing us in the middle of the action, and it gives the narrative a powerful inevitability.

My piece is called the little match girl passion and it sets Hans Christian Andersen's story The Little Match Girl in the format of Bach's Saint Matthew Passion, interspersing Andersen's narrative with my versions of the crowd and character responses from Bach's Passion. The text is by me, after texts by Han Christian Andersen, H. P. Paulli (the first translator of the story into English, in 1872), Picander (the nom de plume of Christian Friedrich Henrici, the librettist of Bach's Saint Matthew Passion), and the Gospel according to Saint Matthew. The word "passion" comes from the Latin word for suffering. There is no Bach in my piece and there is no Jesus—rather the suffering of the Little Match Girl has been substituted for Jesus's, elevating (I hope) her sorrow to a higher plane.

For more information about the little match girl passion, please don't hesitate to write us at info [at] redpoppymusic [dot] com or visit us at www.redpoppymusic.com

From May 10-13, Peak Performances in Montclair, NJ presents cellist Maya Beiser and friends in a new evening-length work by Julia Wolfe called “Spinning”, which celebrates the work once performed by hand by women. Music has long been a vital part of the craft — both as a propelling force and as a distraction. To pay homage to the human dignity of this “women’s work,” Wolfe and Beiser create a sonic universe for three cellos and voice performed by Beiser with Melody Giron and Lavena Johanson featuring multimedia projections imagined by the innovative artist Laurie Olinder.

In Beiser’s words, “I found in Julia’s music a rare quality — combining folk, rock and classical elements in a distinct and relentless energy. This collaboration is one that has been in our minds for many years, and we are thrilled to now embark on this journey together.”

From January 9 - 14, the Prototype Festival presents a new, commissioned, chamber version of Michael Gordon's opera Acquanetta at the Gelsey Kirkland Arts Center in DUMBO, Brooklyn. Based on a 1940's B-movie horror flick called Captive Wild Woman, starring an enigmatic actress and former cheesecake model named Acquanetta, the opera's libretto is written by Deborah Artman.

Stunning and exotic, Acquanetta played the untameable and gorgeous creation resulting from a mad scientist’s experiments on an ape, a role the young actress sizzled in and played so well a sequel was soon in the can. So began a brief career in bread-and-butter films that ended only a few years later when Acquanetta inexplicably walked away from the Hollywood studio system and swanned off to Mexico.

Her past is a mystery. Because of her come-hither stare and sensuous pout, Walter Winchell nicknamed her “The Venezuelan Volcano.” In interviews, she claimed Native American roots, and her obituary in 2004 stated that she was born on an Indian reservation near Cheyenne, Wyoming. Who was Acquanetta, and why did she walk out on her contract with Universal Pictures at the height of her career?

In Acquanetta, the mock serious, campy spirit of horror movies is turned inside out in a bravura, one-act deconstruction of the five minutes that changed Acquanetta’s life forever. The mad scientist Doctor, the insistent Ape, the reluctant Brainy Woman, the visionary Director and the beautiful monster herself, Acquanetta, gather in this re-imagining of that fateful experiment. In soaring, sometimes comic and always indelible songs that perfectly capture the heightened drama of horror films, these vivid characters reveal their inner longings and emotional shadows in what is ultimately a haunting meditation on the meaning of identity, transformation, stereotypes and typecasting, set in the heyday of Hollywood gloss.

On February 8, in Benaryoa Hall, conductor Ludovic Morlot and the Seattle Symphony premiere David Lang's first symphony: symphony without a hero, commissioned for the Seattle Symphony by the Lynn and Brian Grant Family. The 27-minute work is in one movement, with two related parts — two separate musical movements that are performed simultaneously: one heavy and oppressive and one light and hopeful. Lang explains that one doesn't "really hear the light and hopeful music until the oppressive movement ends."

I have worked with So Percussion for a very long time now and I know them really well. When I got the opportunity to write a concerto for them I wanted to make it specifically for them, for the things that they have been concentrating on for the past few years. The are frequently theatrical, they invite found objects into their performances, they build their own instruments, etc. I wondered if I could make the unusualness of their musicality the centerpiece of this concerto, but how could an orchestra of 'normal' instruments doing mostly 'normal' things find common ground with them? My solution was to set up a kind of ecology between the soloists and the orchestra, using the orchestral percussionists as 'translators.' An idea begins with the soloists on an invented instrument, the percussionists in the orchestra hear the solo music and translate it into something that can be approximated by more traditional orchestral percussion, the rest of the orchestra hears and understands the orchestral percussion, and they join in. The opening, for example begins with the soloists snapping twigs, which the orchestral percussionists translate into woodblocks, marimba and xylophone, which the orchestra takes up and embellishes, eventually overwhelming the soloists. This process of finding something intricate and unique, decoding it, regularizing it, and mass producing it reminded me of how a lot of ideas in our world get invented, built and overwhelmed, so I decided to call it 'man made.'

On Saturday July 1 The Crossing Choir premieres Michael Gordon's concert-length work, Anonymous Man. The text is drawn from Gordon's experiences living in a changing neighborhood on a street called Desbrosses in Lower Manhattan, meeting Julia Wolfe (to whom he is married), raising a family, and especially encounters with two homeless men who lived across the street.

The piece reaches a surprising epiphany — after the bombing of the neighboring World Trade Center, and a few years later when one of the homeless men dies and Gordon watches the outpouring of sympathy from the community — that evokes Lincoln's funeral train going through the streets of Manhattan, including Desbrosses St. The interplay of personalities is beautifully rendered in music, springing from Michael’s conversations with the homeless men—serious, funny, mysterious, poetic, and mundane.

Co-commissioned with the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, this is the fifth work with orchestra for Gordon and Morrison, whose fourteen collaborations span nearly 20 years. Another recent Gordon/Morrison collaboration, El Sol Caliente, was premiered last year with the New World Symphony in Miami Beach, FL. Their other collaborations with orchestra are Dystopia (2007), Gotham (2004), and Decasia (2001).

Morrison, who uses archival or found footage that is often in some state of physical decay, feels his films and Gordon’s music connect on a more existential level — a timelessness they both contain. “There is a great majesty in Michael’s work,” Morrison says, “it is enormously forceful. And while it is unmistakably contemporary music, there is a timeless quality to it. It perseveres. I believe that this quality may relate to, and enhance, the old decaying footage I employ.”

Morrison (who edits the films he chooses after Gordon writes the music) took the name, The Unchanging Sea, from the title of a 1912 film by cinema pioneer D.W. Griffith. For Morrison, the Griffith film became a seed for what the project would become: "I looked for other footage that had a similar theme — or could be grouped together with this film — of people embarking on trips out to sea."

Big Beautiful Dark and Scary is one continuous and compelling swell that lives up to every adjective in the title. Wolfe’s music is constantly pushing forward through waves of tension and tremolo until it finally releases a scant 10 seconds before the end of the piece.

— Sequenza21

Anthracite Fields: tours Pennsylvania

“

[Anthracite Fields] captures not only the sadness of hard lives lost…but also of the sweetness and passion of a way of daily life now also lost. The music compels without overstatement. This is a major, profound work.

The special brilliance of 'Steel Hammer' is the way in which the whole exceeds the sum of its parts. As complex and perplexing music...for complex and perplexing times, [Steel Hammer} makes our social concerns no less monumental, just more exciting, which may be the greatest form of activism.

LEWISBURG, Pa. — Onstage, a choir intoned the names of coal miners whose deaths and injuries had landed them on the Pennsylvania Mining Accident index more than a century ago. In the lobby, members of the audience — some of whom came on free shuttle buses that picked them up from nearby coal towns — created an index of their own, writing about their mining ancestors in a small leather notebook held open with a coal paperweight.

Someone had lost one grandfather to a mine collapse, the other to black lung disease. A woman wrote that her grandfather, a Lithuanian immigrant, had lost an eye in a mining accident and “died at age 50 from miner’s asthma + complications.”

Coal is never far from the surface in northeastern Pennsylvania — as a shared heritage, if not always as actual deposits. So anticipation was already running high last week when the composer Julia Wolfe brought “Anthracite Fields,” her Pulitzer Prize-winning choral work honoring the sacrifices of Pennsylvania coal miners, back to her native state.

Then, just before the concerts, coal became front-page news when President Trump moved to roll back pollution regulations in the name of trying to bring coal jobs back, promising miners and coal company executives assembled for a photo op that “you’re going back to work.” Ms. Wolfe’s 2014 oratorio on work, exploitation and unionization took on new overtones as coal became a central part of the Make America Great Again hymnal.

“It feels to me like kind of a romanticization of coal miners — and that doesn’t feel good,” Ms. Wolfe said of the president’s action before a performance of “Anthracite Fields” on Saturday at Bucknell University here in Lewisburg, a college town nestled between coal regions.

Just a short drive away, coal is still in use, with 50-pound bags selling for $8.99 at a gas station in Mount Carmel. Mining remains a point of pride, as a “When Coal Was King” mural in Shamokin attests. But it has also left many scars: from streams that run orange with mine drainage to the almost completely wiped-out community of Centralia, where an underground mine fire has been burning for more than half a century.

“Anthracite Fields,” a five-part oratorio with roots in rock, classical chorales and the avant-garde, may look to the past, but it is anything but nostalgic. The opening intonation of the names is a long list, despite the fact that Ms. Wolfe limited herself to miners named John, and only Johns with one-syllable last names.

The exploitation of the children who worked in the mines is brought home in another movement, “Breaker Boys.” And “Speech,” sung piercingly by the guitarist Mark Stewart, takes its text from John L. Lewis, the fiery leader of the United Mine Workers union: “Those who consume the coal, and you and I who benefit from that service because we live in comfort, we owe protection to those men and we owe the security to their families if they die.”

As the residents of Pennsylvania’s coal regions turned out to hear the piece here, many were fiercely proud of their coal roots — but not anxious to see a large-scale return to mining.

Another movement, “Flowers,” about the way families used to decorate their homes, was inspired by Ms. Wolfe’s interviews with Barbara Powell, 76, a coal miner’s daughter and granddaughter who grew up in Taylor and who now works in the gift shop of the Pennsylvania Anthracite Heritage Museum in Scranton.

Her father survived being buried alive in 1938. Like other miners, he usually shared the ends of his sandwiches with the rats, so they would be around to warn him if there was, she said, “water coming in, or the creaking of a mine roof.” During her senior year in high school a mine subsidence drove her and all her neighbors from their homes. Ms. Powell said in an interview that she was not keen on bringing back mining: “I don’t feel we should have our men go back into the coal mines again, I really don’t. And what it does to the environment!”

After the performance, Robert McCormick, the grandson of a coal miner and a railway worker in Big Mine Run, said that the cavernous low notes of Ms. Wolfe’s opening gave him chills, reminding him of the blackness on their old front porch in the dead of night. He said he didn’t know what to think about the calls to bring back coal, noting that he has a nephew who works as a coal miner, operating machinery on a shift he does alone.

“For him it’s a livelihood,” said Mr. McCormick, an artist who paints coal subjects. “But then there’s my concern over the environment, and his children and the future. I don’t know what the answer is.”

Ms. Wolfe, one of the founders of the new-music collective Bang on a Can, has won the Pulitzer, been awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant and appeared (as a wolf, natch) on the PBS cartoon “Arthur.” She plans to continue writing pieces inspired by struggling American industries: Her next piece, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, will be about the women who worked in New York’s garment industry, including the victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.

With “Anthracite Fields” she tapped a vein — not just with critics and prize juries, but also with audiences. Commissioned by the Mendelssohn Club in Philadelphia, it has been performed in Pennsylvania at Wyoming Seminary in Kingston and, earlier last week, at Penn State. It will travel as far afield this year as Trenton, Amsterdam and Athens.

Ms. Wolfe said that after every performance of the piece, listeners, some of whom are drawn more by the subject matter than by any curiosity about modern composers, come up to her afterward to tell her about their ties to mining.

“I thought in California it wasn’t going to happen, or maybe it would be gold diggers,” she said, recalling a performance at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. “But someone came up to me afterwards and said: ‘My grandfather’s on your list.’”

He was one of the men in the accident index: John Coyle.

Correction: April 4, 2017

An earlier version of this article erroneously included one location where Julia Wolfe’s choral work “Anthracite Fields” will be performed. It will be presented in Trenton, Amsterdam and Athens. It will not be a part of the Bang on a Can Marathon at the Brooklyn Museum.

A version of this article appears in print on April 5, 2017, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: An Oratorio Resonates in Coal Country.

Based on actual 18th-century texts, anatomy theater follows the astonishing progression of an English murderess: from confession to execution and, ultimately, public dissection before a paying audience of fascinated onlookers. Through the miracle of opera, she sings through it all.

anatomy theater conjures a time when "specialists" traveled from town to town in pre-modern Europe, conducting public dissections of the corpses of executed criminals, seeking evidence of moral corruption in the interior of the human body. anatomy theater is a tuneful and grisly theatrical event.

Dion and Lang write:

No singers were harmed in the creation of this opera.

It seems like an odd statement to make about an entertainment, but it is definitely appropriate to make it, since our piece is so full of terrifying things. Crime and punishment, execution, dissection, the thin line that separates moralistic cruelty from dispassionate scientific inquiry — they are all there.

anatomy theater is an opera of villains. There are no lovers, no peacemakers, no heroes in shining armor coming to the rescue. All the characters in our opera are dangerous.

The subject of our opera is a gruesome one — the public dissection of the body of a murderer, in order to find the physical seat of her moral corruption. Set loosely in the early years of the 18th century, the opera mashes up some of the more shockingly pernicious ideas from the history of medicine. It should come as no surprise that the history of anatomy and the history of medicine in general - as well as the history of opera itself - is well stocked with attitudes of misogyny and contempt for the poor. anatomy theater's libretto closely follows the ideas, methods, manners and even some of the surviving documents of early medical thought.

For much of the history of anatomical inquiry the only bodies available for dissection were those of executed convicts, and, after 1752, exclusively murderers. It was genuinely thought that the anatomy of evil people was different from that of law-abiding citizens, that their evil was written on their organs, and that specialists could identify the differences and demonstrate them publicly. This made public dissections a kind of moral carnival, in which upstanding citizens could literally look down on the flawed remains of evildoers. It is also true that the act of anatomical examination was understood clearly as an additional punishment that could be meted out beyond the death of the convict.

Female cadavers were very rare. In fact, when Vesalius, the pre-eminent anatomist of the 16th century, posed for the frontispiece piece of his "De Corporis Fabrica" (1543) he braggingly made Jan Stephen van Calcar depict him dissecting a woman's body. In England, The Anatomy Act of 1832 put a stop to grave robbing and the illicit trade in corpses, but it allowed anatomists access to unclaimed bodies from prisons, poor houses and charity hospitals, forever linking the teaching of dissection with poverty, criminality and powerlessness.

“Beyond the ever-shifting rhythmic crosscurrents that give the music its vigor and hypnotic intensity, 'Timber' also plays on tones unique to each plank. Amplified in performance, overtones hover and fuse, conjuring eerie moans and radiant coronas.”

— New York Times

When Michael Gordon's Timberpremiered in 2011, it changed the game for percussion composition. Timber is scored for six wooden 2x4 planks. Called simantras, they aren't your typical percussion instruments. When first working with the planks Gordon discovered that "these slabs of wood, which looked like standard building materials from a lumberyard to me, had a gorgeous sound. It was distinct enough so that the clarity of the percussive hits could be heard, and was also extremely resonant, producing a complex field of overtones."

The sounds Timber created caused audiences to ask the composer about the electronic instruments used in the piece. There were none.

Nevertheless, the question of electronics got Gordon thinking. In 2012 he decided to invite electronic music artists to remix Timber.

On October 28th Cantaloupe Music releases Timber Remixed, a 2-CD package of remixes of Mantra Percussion's recording of Timber from an A-list of producers and DJs and a live recording performed by Mantra Percussion at the 2014 Bang on a Can Marathon. Featuring contributions from a diverse range of musicians from across the electronic music spectrum, Timber Remixed gives Gordon's deep exploration into the extreme possibilities of rhythm the full electronic treatment.

Featuring remixes by Squarepusher, Oneohtrix Point Never, Tim Hecker, Hauschka, Jóhann Jóhannsson, and more, these tracks highlight the connections between the new wave of compositions for percussionists and the fascinatingly warped rhythms explored by producers of all stripes in the underground electronic music world. Timber Remixed is also released in a limited edition, individually numbered 12" vinyl LP that contains six key remixes.

Timber was co-commissioned by Club Guy and Roni, Slagwerk Den Haag and Mantra Percussion, with support from the Nief Norf project. Timber had its world premiere in June 2011 at Korzo Theatre in Den Haag, The Netherlands, with Slagwerk Den Haag and its US premiere with Mantra Percussion in October 2012 at BGSU New Music Festival.

Julia Wolfe has been named a 2016 MacArthur Fellow. The MacArthur Fellows Program awards unrestricted fellowships to “talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.”

The Loser, David Lang’s beautiful and startlingly original opera, had its world premiere this month at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Composed for a solo baritone, a chamber ensemble, and a concert pianist, the opera (Lang not only wrote the music but is also responsible for the libretto and the stage direction) has been adapted from the Thomas Bernhard novel of the same name—a book which, since its publication in 1983, has attracted an almost cultish following.

Bernhard’s plot, such as it is, concerns three men who at one time were fellow students at the Mozarteum, a celebrated music academy in Salzburg. One of them was the legendary pianist Glenn Gould. (Bernhard takes a number of significant liberties with the facts of Gould’s biography and inserts autobiographical elements into his imagined version of Gould’s life; in reality, Gould never studied the piano with Horowitz in Austria, nor did he suffer from the lung disease—as he does in the novel—that afflicted Bernhard.) The novel’s narrator, whom Gould has nicknamed the philosopher, is another of Horowitz’s former students. The third member of the trio, Wertheimer, has been ignominiously dubbed “the loser.”

All three are accomplished musicians, but when Gould’s friends hear him play Bach’s Goldberg Variations, they admit to themselves that they will never have—never approach—his unique genius, and they decide to stop playing altogether. (Bernhard at one time considered a career in music, but, like his narrator and Wertheimer, gave it up when he realized that he lacked sufficient talent to be a great performer.) To insure the irrevocability of his renunciation, the narrator donates his rare, beloved Steinway to a provincial music teacher’s daughter, who promptly ruins it; in one of the novel’s (and the opera’s) most comical and awful moments, he keeps repeating three words, on the way to the music teacher’s house, “Absolutely no artist! Absolutely no artist! Absolutely no artist!” The loser retreats to his family’s hunting lodge in the Austrian countryside and eventually commits suicide near the home, in Switzerland, of the loyal sister whom he mistreated for years, whom he referred to as his page turner, and who finally deserted him in order to marry the owner of a chemical plant.

Like much of Bernhard’s work, The Loser is an obsessive, maddened rant about, among other things, the ways in which art can change (and destroy) our lives, and about the paralyzing and potentially fatal dread of mediocrity and failure. Its incantatory rhythms, eccentric repetitions—as well as Bernhard’s characteristically bilious humor—make one want to read passages of it aloud to whoever can be persuaded to listen. Several years ago, Deborah Eisenberg and Wallace Shawn presented a staged performance of the novel at Hunter College. The two writers took turns reading from the book until they were stopped by a timer, set to go off after precisely sixty minutes; the effect of the piece was at once hilarious and riveting.

Yet despite its mesmerizing power, the novel contains none of the dramatic events and situations—murders, betrayals, star-crossed lovers—that we ordinarily associate with opera. Told mostly in retrospect, The Loser (again like most of Bernhard’s fiction) is neither a linear nor a chronological narrative, but instead proceeds by a sort of accretion of both pertinent and irrelevant details and information, as the narrator digresses, philosophizes, makes comically broad and often illogical generalizations, circles around his subject matter, and in general does everything possible to avoid confronting and revealing the most distressing parts of his story.

The fact that there is essentially only a single voice in the novel—the dominant, controlling, even bullying consciousness of the narrator—is only one of the elements that must have made The Loser a challenge to adapt for the stage. Even more intimidating would have been the gauntlet that Bernhard and his characters have thrown down: if you aspire to be any sort of artist, particularly a musician, be brilliant, be a genius—or don’t bother.

The good news is that Lang, who won the Pulitzer Prize for The Little Match Girl Passion (2008), has indeed done something brilliant, rich with pleasures and surprises even for those who know the novel well and may arrive at the theater with certain expectations, preconceptions, and reservations. The first of these welcome surprises was that the entire orchestra level of the Howard Gilman Opera House had been closed off. All of the seating was in the mezzanine, so that the audience was on the same level as the narrator (Rod Gilfry), who sang his hour-long monologue from a small, narrow black platform, at the top of a long black staircase, some twenty feet above the floor of the main auditorium. The unusual staging puts us into an intimate sort of proximity to the narrator, even as he, paradoxically, seems more alone. Only he and his little platform are illuminated; totally surrounded by blackness above and below, he seems even more isolated than he would were he simply standing in the center of a dark stage.

Further along in the production, the lighting (ingeniously designed by Jennifer Tipton) came up on the background, where we could—as if from a great distance—a grand piano, on which a pianist (Conrad Tao) is playing a lyrical, melodic composition. By then, we have learned how and why and when the narrator has given up music; and the impassioned pianist may remind us of Glenn Gould, and of everything that “the philosopher” and “the loser” have willfully rejected.

Dressed in a tuxedo (the costumes have been fashioned by the versatile designer and performance artist Suzanne Bocanegra), the narrator—in short bursts of recitative that closely mimic the propulsive cadences of the novel—begins by alluding to the death of his friends. “Even Glenn Gould, our friend and the most important piano virtuoso of the century, only made it to the age of fifty-one, I thought to myself as I entered the inn. Now of course he didn’t kill himself like Wertheimer, but died, as they say, a natural death. Exactly twenty-eight years ago we had studied with Horowitz and we (at least Wertheimer and I, but of course not Glenn Gould) learned more from Horowitz than during eight previous years at the Vienna Academy.” By the end of the first section, we will have learned why the narrator has donated his Steinway to the music teacher’s daughter:

If I hadn’t met Glenn Gould, I probably wouldn’t have given up the piano and would have become a piano virtuoso and perhaps even one of the best piano virtuosos in the world, I thought in the inn. When we meet the very best, we have to give up, I thought.

Gilfry’s hour-long performance—periodically accompanied by an offstage (and unseen) chamber group conducted by Karina Canellakis—is extraordinary. Not only must he carry the burden of the narrative, singing the text which has been lucidly translated by Jack Dawson and distilled from the novel by Lang, but he must also act, employing an intentionally and tragically limited vocabulary of facial expressions and gestures to communicate a constricted range of emotions: bemusement, contempt, rage, regret, superiority, and sorrow. If we find ourselves, at numerous points in the opera, thinking of Bach, it’s not only because of the references to Gould’s famous interpretation of The Goldberg Variations, or because the way Tao leans over the keyboard may remind us of Gould, but because the tone, the melody, and especially the phrasing of the narrator’s part so strongly evokes the recitatives in Bach’s cantatas.

The excerpts from Dawson’s translation have been taken from a book (available as a Vintage paperback) of almost two hundred pages; to have set the whole thing to music would have produced something closer in length to the Nibelung Cycle and would have greatly tested the audience’s attention and patience without adding much to the opera, especially since so much of the novel depends on the obsessive repetition of certain key words and phrases—“my deterioration process,” “piano radicalism,” “I thought as I entered the inn.” Lang has done an excellent job of condensing a novel into a text that occupies five (single-spaced, double-columned) pages in the program without sacrificing the sense and the coherence of the narrative.

Necessarily, much has been left out. I found myself missing the political and historical element added to the novel by the fury of the narrator’s hatred for Salzburg and, by extension, Austria: a near-mania that the narrator shares with his creator, whose frequent and scandalous public expressions of anti-Austrian sentiment insured that his work would be severely criticized and widely despised in his native land. Bernhard, who died in 1989, specified in his will that none of his books or plays could be published or performed in Austria until the terms of copyright had expired. Watching Lang’s opera, I missed the revelation, which occurs far into the book, that Wertheimer was a Jew—a not insignificant fact, given that nearly all of the action transpires in postwar Austria, with its abysmal record of anti-Semitism after the country was annexed by the Germans in 1938. In the novel, though not in the opera, the three music students rent a house that had once belonged to a “recently deceased Nazi sculptor,” where they are surrounded by “marble eyesores…that had been created by a world-famous artist, as we were told, who had worked for years in the service of Hitler.”

But far more has been gained than lost in Lang’s adaptation. The beauty of the music makes us more intensely aware of the grief and disappointment that fuel the narrator’s anger. Tao’s marvelous performance and Lang’s restrained and gorgeous score are haunting reminders of what the narrator has given up. This is, after all, his whole life that he is talking about: his blighted dreams, his unrealized hopes. His pain can only be mediated by his shaky conviction that at least he is not as pitiful as Wertheimer. At least he has not killed himself, like the loser, and has survived to live with—and tell us—his tragic and weirdly comical story.

“...the score is a model of how music can animate words. The text is set with impressive clarity, and Mr. Gilfry sings every phrase with crisp diction and dramatic point, delivering phrases with virile energy, sudden bluster, or, during vulnerable moments, an aching confusion that takes you by surprise.”— Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times

He appears to float in the nothingness. Confined to a tall tower 20 feet above the seats, he is alone, broken, and has a story to tell.

In this daringly staged one-act opera from Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang—featuring mezzanine-only seating and based on the novel by Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard—a failed piano student (baritone Rod Gilfry, Anna Nicole, 2013 Next Wave) recounts a life lived in the shadows of his famous friend Glenn Gould. As virtuoso pianist Conrad Tao and a chamber ensemble conducted by Karina Cannelakis accompany from far in the distance, the cavernous space engulfs the singer, as he sings of the distance that separates beauty from perfection.

Libretto, music, and stage direction by David LangAdapted from the novel by Thomas BernhardTranslated from German by Jack Dawson

The 2016 Richard B. Fisher Next Wave Award honors David Lang and the production of the loser.